News

Professors at the Palace

On Tuesday 4 March, Professor Sonia Livingstone has just collected her
OBE, for services to children and child internet safety, at Buckingham
Palace. Sonia is the first academic in the field of media and
communications nationally ever to receive such an honour. The Duke of
Cambridge presented Professor Livingstone with her medal and
congratulated her on her important work.

Language Centre student wins prestigious award

Edward Knight, a first year International Relations student who is also
studying an advanced Mandarin degree course at the LSE Language Centre,
won the ‘Most Eloquent Award’ at the 13th Chinese Bridge University
student Language Proficiency Competition UK Final on Saturday 22 March.

It is the first time an undergraduate student in the UK not studying
Mandarin Chinese as their degree has won such prize at national level -
congratulations to all involved!

Sport Relief at LSE

Following last Friday's activities, the School has so raised nearly
£500 for Sport Relief.

The taster sessions were enjoyed by all who attended. The Students'
Union triumphed in the LSE Triathlon, although there was some stiff
opposition from staff, particularly one individual who set an impressive
target on his own against the teams of four.

The cake sale hit all the right spots with some delicious buns and
biscuits, and a spectacular winner of the Bake Off which would have made
even Mary Berry proud.

The day's final event, was the LSE Mile, where runners and walkers,
including the Director Craig Calhoun, took in a few laps of Lincoln's
Inn Fields. See more of the day's action
here.

From 'How to change banking culture' to 'How to design better cities'
- new open enrolment executive programmes at LSE

Taking place at LSE for the sixth year running, the Executive Summer School
continues to offer a diverse schedule of short, academically challenging
courses. Sixteen courses are scheduled over two intensive sessions from
Monday 23 June to Friday 4 July, including four new areas of study targeted
at global executives. These courses draw upon the expertise and experience
of faculty from LSE's Management, Finance and Accounting departments, in
addition to its highly recognised LSE Cities international research centre.

The programmes Academic Director, Professor Danny Quah, said; "These new
courses will face up to the immediate current challenges confronting today’s
executive, while at the same time they provide in-depth, enduring, and
rigorous knowledge on those crucial forces that will continue to shape the
modern business environment."
More

Academics abroadDr Shani Orgad
On Friday 4 April, Dr Shani Orgad, Department of Media and Communications,
will be delivering a keynote lecture at the annual conference of the
Media Studies
Finnish Association.

Based on her book Media Representation and the
Global Imagination (Polity), Orgad’s speech ‘The Others are Coming’
explores how contemporary media represent immigrants and migration. Orgad begins her lecture
with the example of Paddington Bear to provoke people to think about how today's media
invite us to imagine immigrants and question why the
media are so often inhospitable but when they are - as in the case of
Paddington - hospitality is almost
always conditioned on the migrant becoming similar to 'us' (the host
society).

Professor Jean-Paul FaguetProfessor Jean-Paul Faguet is lecturing today at Addis Ababa University
and the Ethiopian Ministry of Education on a new study he co-wrote
'Improving Basic Services for the Bottom Forty Percent: lessons from
Ethiopia'. Professor Faguet will also be visiting the World Bank.

Notices

The Women's Library @ LSE

Following the completion of The Women’s Library @ LSE Reading Room, work has
now commenced on the construction of a Teaching and Activity Room in the
Library, to be followed by an Exhibition Space. The Exhibition Space will be
located in the Escape area, and the Teaching and Activity Room will be
located on the Lower Ground Floor. Both works are expected to be completed
later this year.

The Exhibition Space will display key items from The Women’s Library @ LSE
Collection and will be free to access to the public. The Teaching and
Activity Room will allow the Library to increase access to the collections,
with both new areas playing an integral role in the wider
redevelopment planned for the Lionel Robbins Building.
The building work will take place behind internal walls
on the lower ground floor in order to minimise the impact on students
working in the Library. The Library expects the impact on students study to
be minimal, and notices will be placed in the effected area during the work.
The Women’s Library @ LSE collection can be accessed from The
Women’s Library @ LSE Reading Room on the fourth floor of the Library, which
is
due to open on Monday 31 March.

LSE - Sciences Po Faculty Mobility Scheme 2014-15

LSE and Sciences Po have been institutional partners for the past decade.
The annual faculty mobility scheme is the newest initiative in our academic
collaboration. The scheme enables faculty to spend at least a month in a
host department at the other institution in order to engage with other
students; to foster networks between colleagues and help wider departmental
and institutional interests.

There are two options in the scheme to give maximum flexibility.

Mode A: shorter visits of one month, whereby visiting faculty
deliver at least eight hours of teaching (or a short course) and spend
at least four hours with PhD students

Mode B: longer visits of three months, whereby visiting faculty
deliver at least 20 hours of teaching, spend at least 10 hours with PhD
students and deliver a departmental or public lecture

Participants will continue to receive their normal salary and a travel
grant from their home institution. They will also receive a subsistence
allowance or salary from the host institution.
The deadline for applications is Wednesday 7 May.
More

LSE blogging survey

The LSE Public Policy Group runs five academic blogs on behalf of the
School. The oldest, British Politics and Policy, has been running since
February 2010 whereas the newest, USAPP focusing on American politics
and policy, is only seven months old. We would really like to get
colleagues feedback about how often they read the blogs, what they like
about them and what we could do better. Please spare us five minutes to
take this short survey
here.

National Centre for Research Methods survey

Dr Daniel Kilburn, an LSE alumnus who now works for the ESRC’s ‘National
Centre for Research Methods’ (NCRM), which is involved in the funding, delivering
and researching the teaching/learning of social research methods and skills
amongst those working in UK academia (from PhDs up to professors). For the
past year, he has been researching how social research skills are
taught and learnt amongst those at the start of their academic careers; work
which has involved lots of talking to ‘experts’ and observing
teaching and training across the country.

NCRM has now summarised its early findings and wants
early-career academics and researchers to comment on it. The NCRM team wants
to engage
as many early-career academics and researchers as possible to get
their feedback on the work done so far. Take a look at the research and give
your feedback here.

Senior Common Room Annual Dinner

Any member of staff may attend the Senior Common Room Annual Dinner on
Wednesday 21 May. The guest of honour and speaker this year is
LSE Emeritus Governor Loyd Grossman OBE. Booking information is on the
SCR website.

LSE has joined the Global Corporate Challenge. Whatever your current
level of activity, if having fun and taking a virtual journey around the
world sounds right up your street, then GCC has a place waiting for you.

Form a team of seven with your colleagues, choose a team captain and on
Wednesday 28 May, begin a 100 day virtual journey around the world with
55,000 other teams from all across the globe. The more active you are each
day, the further your team will progress and the higher you’ll race up the
leader board.

Once your team is confirmed, each of you will receive a starter kit with two
GCC Pulses (accelerometers that track your activity). Walking, running,
cycling, swimming, ballroom dancing whatever you’re into - everything counts
as you aim for at least 10,000 steps a day.

Keep an eye out for more information about how to start your adventure
coming soon...

LSE Arts: call for exhibition proposals

LSE Arts has hosted many interesting and socially driven art projects in the
past and you have the opportunity to hold your own exhibition to draw
attention to the issues you think important. The Atrium Gallery in the Old
Building is the perfect space to display your pieces; recent exhibitions
include
Photo Prize 2014,
Rainbow Jews and
The World, So Rich. For more information about holding exhibitions in
the gallery, email arts@lse.ac.uk,
or click
here.

Thanks from Alan Revel

Thank you to all those who supported LSE's Event Manager, Alan Revel, in
his sponsored swim for Sport Relief. So far, he's raised over £800, far
more than he was expecting. Alan completed the 5km swim in two hours ten
minutes. The cycle ride to work straight after actually proved tougher
than the swim! Help Alan raise even more and congratulate his efforts by
donating to the great Sport Relief cause
here.

Skip fit classes

The next skip fit classes are on Tuesday 1 and 15 April at 1-2pm in the Badminton Court, Old Building.
There will be no classes on Tuesday 8, 22 and 29 April, but skipping
ropes will be back with a vengeance after Easter with the first class to get
burning off those extra calories from the chocolate eggs on Tuesday 6 May.

Just turn up on any of these dates with your own skipping rope. All lessons
are free. For more information, email Daniel at
d.beckley@lse.ac.uk.

Technology tip - Excel’s calculation preview

If you need to get a quick calculation preview of a range of numbers in a
spreadsheet without creating a formula, select the range of interest and
look at the bottom of the screen near the clock. The Average, Count, and Sum
results will be shown there.

LSE
in pictures

This week's picture features.....
For more images like this, visit the
Photography Unit.

Events

‘Reflections’ - on Monday 31 March
at 6-7.30pm in the Sheikh Zayed Theatre with James Dawson, Kate Kingsley, Geraldine McCaughrean, Jon
Robinson.

The culmination of the 2013-14 LSE and First Story creative writing
competition sees a panel of award-winning young adult authors discussing
self-portraits - how much of themselves do they include in their
writing? This is a
free event aimed at 11-18 years olds, followed by a
complimentary drinks reception, including soft drinks.
More

'Freedom in Forgiveness' - on Thursday 3 April at 6.30pm in
the New Theatre, East Building with Amanda Lindhout

As a child, Amanda Lindhout escaped a violent household by paging through
issues of National Geographic and imagining herself in its exotic locales.
At the age of 19, she began travelling the globe. Aspiring to understand the
world and live a significant life, she backpacked through Latin America and
Laos. In war-ridden Afghanistan and Iraq she carved out a fledgling career
as a television reporter. And then, in August 2008, she travelled to
Somalia—“the most dangerous place on earth.” On her fourth day, she was
abducted by a group of masked men along a dusty road.
More

‘Nationalism, Internationalism and Cosmopolitanism: some lessons from
modern Indian history’ – on Thursday 3 April at 6.30pm in the Sheikh
Zayed Theatre with Professor Partha Chatterjee

This lecture deals with four strands of trans-regional political movement
in India’s 19th and 20th century anti-colonial history: Islamic jihad,
nationalism, communism and those who deplored the narrow self-aggrandisement
of nationalism and pleaded for an opening to world humanity. All of these
strands, with their possibilities and limits, continue to be vibrant today.
More

'War: what is it good for?' - on Thursday 10 April at 6.30pm
in the Hong Kong Theatre, Clement House with Professor Ian Morris and
Professor Christopher Coker

If you had been born 20,000 years ago, you would have faced a one in ten
or even one in five chance of dying violently. But in the century since
1914—despite its two world wars, atomic bombs, and multiple genocides—that
risk has fallen to barely one in 100. Why? The answer is uncomfortable:
despite all its horrors, over the long run war itself has made the world a
safer and richer place, because war alone has proved able to create larger
societies that pacify themselves internally.
More

LSESU Visual Arts Society - from Monday 28 April to
Friday 6 June at 10am-8pm

The LSESU Visual Arts Society brings together a fantastic collection of work
from across the student body. The nature and variety of the collection
reflects the diversity within the school and showcases the superb creative
talent of many LSE students.
More

60
second interview

with.....Dr Tiziana Leone

I am a lecturer in Demography in the department of Social Policy. My key area of interest is reproductive and maternal health in low income countries. Outside of the office, my interests before I had two children who took the majority of my social life, were movies, indie music and joinery. Iranian movies and Miyazaki’s animes are my two greatest passions. I have struggled over the years to find people to go with to see Kiarostami’s movies - probably the last straw was when I took my partner to see Shirin, a movie entirely about the audience’s involvement the film where you only hear the movie and see the audience in the cinema… So going to the cinema on my own in the early afternoon has become one of my favourite treats. As for joinery, it’s great to spend some time in a workshop and not be sat in front of a PC. I’ve also made some nice furniture - I copied an Arne Jacobsen table paying £50 for the material rather than £2000 for an original, although admittedly mine does have 'some' flaws… I dream one day to retire and be a full time Geppetto (Pinocchio’s Dad).

Which has been the most interesting LSE public lecture you have attended?
I think rather than the most interesting the most entertaining has been the one we organised with Hans Rosling talking about population growth last year. He's a real hero for data geeks like me.

Which is your favourite place on the LSE campus?
The top floor of the NAB. Just wish I could get an office there…

What is your favourite type of music?
Indie and opera. Radiohead and Verdi go along very well.

Where did you go on your last holiday and what were the pros and cons?
It was a very family-orientated camping holiday at the seaside in Italy. It was slightly dull and cramped but we had great seaside just two minutes walk away and, unlike Cornwall, the sea temperature was perfect even in June! As an added bonus, you could get the best buffalo mozzarella freshly made every day…

How do you like to relax?
Knitting and watching cheesy costume dramas.

Name three things you cannot do without?
A latte in the morning, a watch, BBC Radio 6.

For more information, visit
Jobs at LSE and login via the instructions under the 'Internal
vacancies' heading.

Get
in touch!

If you have some news, an achievement, or an aspect of LSE life that you
would like to share, I would love to hear from you. Do get in touch
at m.wall@lse.ac.uk
or on ext 7582.

The next edition of Staff News is on Thursday 10
April. Articles for this should be emailed to me by
Tuesday 8 April. Staff
News is emailed every Thursday during term time and fortnightly during
the holidays.